We currently have two services, one at 9:30AM and one at 11:30AM.

We will have a special service schedule on Christmas Eve Sunday.

We will have one service at 10:30AM during the months of January, February, and March as part of our congregation’s intentional exploration during our current period of interim ministry.

What to expect

Worship services at Silver Spring are vital, engaging, diverse, and central to our life as a community. Most visitors mention the energy they feel in the building and the people when we share Sunday morning together and that seems to be a foundational part of our experience together. Worship connects us, uplifts us, challenges us and comforts us. We are a diverse congregation, with a wide range of gifts, needs and perspectives, and our worship reflects us in this. The mood of a worship service can range from personal to political, spiritual to practical, individual to global, and reflective to humorous, grounding to inspiring – sometimes all in the same service! We draw on world religious traditions with respect and care, and celebrate a number of holidays within the church year: the Jewish High Holidays, Samhain, Christmas and Hannukah, Solstice, Martin Luther King Sunday, Easter, Passover, and more. Our Sunday experience is one of the strengths we are proud of and glad to share with visitors. Though the elements of a service may vary from week to week, they always include live music. We have a choir, house band, celtic music ensemble and a number of gifted musicians and vocalists within our church. We also invite local and national artists to celebrate with us over the course of the year. We sing hymns from two hymnals, Singing the Living Tradition and Singing the Journey, and sometimes incorporate popular, folk, spiritual, gospel and world music into our congregational singing. For the spoken aspects of our service, we draw on both sacred and secular texts. We also share in reflective readings, prayer, and silence for personal meditation. Most, but not all, of our services feature a sermon. Generally, these are delivered by our parish minister; however, during the summer, and frequently during the rest of the year, a church member or guest preacher speaks on a special topic.

The Rev. Evan Keely, Interim Minister There are a lot of ways to think about Hanukkah. It is a holiday on the Jewish calendar (this year, it begins this Tuesday evening) which commemorates an event in history; it can be a time for a community to reflect on its collective past. Passover extends a similar invitation to think about a different ancient…

The holiday season is a time for many of us to be with our families, and all the joy and the heartache (often both) that that may entail. But family dynamics can also be a lesson for us in how human organizations work – and don’t.

Martin Luther’s presentation of his 95 Theses at the end of October 1517 is traditionally understood as the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. Five hundred years later, what have we learned, and what might the future hold?

How does ritual connect us to the sacred? Our new Director of Religious Education Catherine Boyle discussed her time spent at Tsubaki Grand Shrine in Japan and the power and meaning of ritual within Shinto.

Columbus Day is always fraught with the pain of remembering that encounters between Europeans and the native peoples of this hemisphere have included profound injustices. In 2017, confronting these tensions is as important as ever.

In the 1930s, Indian author and scholar Shri Purohit Swami wrote his English translations of Hindu scriptures, and he did so making an effort to translate these ancient texts in a way that Westerners unfamiliar with Hindu concepts and mores would find accessible. These words are from his translation of the Bhagavad Gita [12:1-10]:

Arjuna asked: My Lord! Which are the better devotees who worship Thee, those who try to know Thee as a Personal God, or those who worship Thee as Impersonal and Indestructible?

Lord Shri Krishna replied: Those who keep their minds fixed on Me, who worship Me always with unwavering faith and concentration; these are the very best. Those who worship Me as the Indestructible, the Undefinable, the Omnipresent, the Unthinkable, the Primeval, the Immutable and the Eternal; subduing their senses, viewing all conditions of life with the same eye, and working for the welfare of all beings, assuredly they come to Me.

But they who thus fix their attention on the Absolute and Impersonal encounter greater hardships, for it is difficult for those who possess a body to realize Me as without one.

Verily, those who surrender their actions to Me, who muse on Me, worship Me and meditate on Me alone, with no thought save of Me, O Arjuna! I rescue them from the ocean of life and death, for their minds are fixed on Me.

Then let thy mind cling only to Me, let thy intellect abide in Me; and without doubt thou shalt live hereafter in Me alone. But if thou canst not fix thy mind firmly on Me, then, My beloved friend, try to do so by constant practice. And if thou are not strong enough to practice concentration, then devote thyself to My service, do all thine acts for My sake, and thou shalt still attain the goal.